When you have a blog and website, and I guess it might depend on whether your site is seen to be ‘successful’ or not, you get a lot of unsolicited emails about advertising and completely irrelevant guest posts. I reply to most of these with a polite ‘no thanks’, but I do reply.
I had an email yesterday which I thought was going to be one of that bunch, but actually it wasn’t.
Here is what i received:
Subject: Broken link on markavery.info
From: <[email protected]>
Date: Tue, May 26, 2020 4:54 am
Hi, I’m reaching out on behalf of Lexico.com because I noticed that there’s a page on your site where a link was pointing to OxfordDictionaries.com, and that link is now broken. The content from OxfordDictionaries.com has been moved to Lexico.com, and I have an updated link that leads to the original article you referenced. Here’s the info in case you’d like to update it:
Page: https://markavery.info/2019/06/26/flows-2/
Anchor text: web page
New URL: https://www.lexico.com/explore/is-snuck-a-real-word
Please let me know if you have any questions!
Thanks!
I had a look at this and replied as follows;
On Wed, May 27, 2020 at 5:38 AM <[email protected]> wrote:
XXXXXXX
When I got your email I groaned slightly and thought that it was one of those many spam emails that come the way of bloggers. But I see it isn’t. So I have looked at the new site and updated the link as you suggested.
I’m now fascinated that you do this for a living! You can’t spend your whole time sending emails like the one you sent to me – or do you? What else do you do?
Are you paid by results? If so, I’ve just earned you some money. I expect you will be too busy to reply to this email, but I wasn’t too busy to reply to yours and I am now interested in what you do.
best wishes
M
You’ll see I wrote this email early this morning, after listening to a Cuckoo and watering the vegetables, and doing some work. I didn’t really expect to get a reply, but I did;
Subject: Re: Broken link on markavery.info
From: [email protected]
Date: Wed, May 27, 2020 3:33 pm
Thank you so much for fixing that link! This isn’t the only thing I do all day—I do digital PR work, so basically I’m working to increase brand visibility online and to provide a better user experience for those who enter client websites. We want people to be able to find the right pages, so fixing broken links comes as part of that!
It’s kind of a niche job and it’s evolving each day. I work for a firm and we bill clients by the hour, not necessarily the results. But of course, if we aren’t getting results, clients may not want to renew their contract, so results are still extremely important.
Happy to answer other questions you have and thanks for getting back to me!
Cheers,
xxxxxxx
This little exchange made me a little bit happier than I would otherwise be. We each treated the other as another person rather than ‘work’, and that put a smile on my face.
And if you do go back to the relevant blog – click here – and then click on the word ‘snuck’ you’ll find a rather good explanation of the word ‘snuck’. Who’d have thought it?
A fairly trivial matter – but a nice moment in my day – so I thought I’d share it with you.
I would suspect that the original email was bulk created with a lot of others from a database of such, compiled by Lexico. It’s good housekeeping practice though and makes everyone’s life easier, so good for them, esp. as not many organisations do it.